

WILLIAM H. FISHBURN 



(Price Ten Cents) 



Red Blood Is Red 



<:>♦<::> 



By 
REV. WILLIAM H. FISHBURN, D.D. 



A Sermon Delivered in West Adams Presbyterian 

Church, Los Angeles, California, 

April 28, 1918 



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Published by order of the Session. 



Red Blood Is Red 



Matt. 17:20, "If ye have faith as a 
grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto 
this mountain, Remove hence! 
And it shall remove." 



As some persons interpret these words of 
Jesus, they must seem like the veriest undi- 
luted nonsense. "Ye shall say unto this moun- 
tain, 'Remove hence!' and it shall remove." 

Walk to your door and command Mt. Lowe 
to remove. Charge Mt. Wilson to vanish. Or- 
der the Sierra Madre range to disappear. Will 
they go? They will not! 

The kind of Faith that would look calmly 
out of its door and issue orders to the moun- 
tains would never make them go, but the Faith 
that makes plans and prepares blue-prints and 
uses spades and pick-axes and blasting powder 
will remove mountains. 

Our Lord is not thinking about mountains 
of clay and rock and gravel. Anybody with 
the tools of labor can remove that sort of 
mountain. He is thinking about mountains of 
evil ; mountains of obstruction that get in the 
path of every forward-looking person ; moun- 
tains of difficulty; mountains of tragedy that 
strike through human lives, and the like, — 
they are the mountains that can be moved out 
of the way by nothing but a giant faith, a 
masterful, red-blooded faith, a faith that be- 
lieves in God and translates its belief into 
work. 

Jesus is not calling attention to the little- 



ness of the mustard seed ; He is calling at- 
tention to the immense power that resides in 
it in spite of its littleness. He does not say, 
'*If ye have faith as a grain of sand," or "If 
ye have faith as a grain of dust." They are 
lifeless. The mustard seed is alive. 

Maybe, if we had a microscope of greater 
magnifying power, we might look into that 
little speck of a thing called a mustard seed 
and see a living pulse beating in the very cen- 
ter of it. Every molecule, every atom within 
this tiny shell works, works mightily, works 
harmoniously. Somewhere within it is life, 
potent, unconquerable life, life that will burst 
through this husk and multiply itself a thou- 
sand-fold. 

The mustard seed is a little vegetable dy- 
namo, packed from center to circumference 
with power. And faith, the kind of faith that 
our Lord says can remove mountains, turns a 
man into a human dynamo. 

Mountains to be removed by Faith,— there is 
a chain of mountains stretching across Europe 
and half way across Asiatic Russia, — moun- 
tains of imperialism, mountains of tyranny, 
mountains of oppression, mountains of brutal- 
ity, — and all of them are going to be made 
level with the ground in your time and mine, 
and they are going to be leveled by Faith. But 
it is the kind of faith that resides in the mus- 
tard seed, living faith, vital faith, — faith of the 
kind that builds ships, and airplanes, and can- 
non, and machine guns, and rifles, — that 
forges swords and bayonets, — that sends forth 
man-power, — faith that is going to win be- 
cause it believes and lives its faith in its life. 

Some of you have a wrong mental picture 
of faith. You think of it as a quiet man sit- 

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ting in a cushioned chair and getting things 
done because he hopes and expects and waits. 
That is not faith. That is religious laziness. 
Faith is a man clad in war-harness, squared 
jaw, head down, teeth set, going over the top 
with fixed bayonet, — fighting for the rights of 
man, — ready to give his blood for the rights 
of man. That is faith. That is the faith that 
removes mountains. 

A great many of our artists have confound- 
ed faith with trust. They portray faith as 
tranquility. Faith is not tranquility ; it is trust 
that is tranquility. You have seen that fine 
engraving of a little child kneeling beside a 
crib, uplifted eyes, folded hands, a beam of 
morning sunshine illuminating the sweet face, 
— and the picture is called **Faith." That is 
not faith ; it is trust. 

A picture of real faith is Jacob, there in 
the dark by the brook Jabbok, wrestling 
through the long night with a mighty angel, 
wrestling until his thews and sinews snap and 
his bones are out of joint. A picture of real 
faith is the strong Christ bowed there in the 
Garden of Gethsemane, bowed all along upon 
the ground, praying, praying, praying to the 
Father until His sweat is like great drops of 
blood falling down to the ground. 

Faith and Trust must not be confounded. 
Faith is no more like Trust than nitroglycerin 
is like oil of roses ; than a naked sword is like 
an olive branch; than an eagle is like a dove. 
Faith is alive. Faith without works is dead. 
So is a clock. So is a watch. A clock or a 
watch without works is dead. Faith without 
works is dead. Faith, the kind of faith that 
our Lord Jesus taught earnest men to have, 
is the thing that makes all other things go. 



We Americans are a people at war. We 
are facing the mountains of Kaiserism which 
is Prussianism which is diabolism, — and com- 
manding it in God's name to go, — to be cast 
into the midst of the sea. But it is not going 
to go because we talk to it or write letters to 
it or issue order to it, but only because we 
smite it and pierce it and stab it and wound it 
with a sword that drips blood at every stroke 
and every thrust. 

The Sword of Faith is a red sword. It is a 
sword that draws blood. "Without shedding 
of blood," says this Book, ''there is no re- 
mission." Everything we win we win with 
the precious coin of blood drops. The only 
money that has purchased our progress, our 
civilization, our growth upward and God-ward, 
is the red money that comes out of the veins 
of living men. Faith means the shedding of 
blood. To convince yourself of that, read the 
Faith Chapter, the 11th of Hebrews, and see 
how that chapter runs red with the blood of 
heroes, — men and women, — whose deeds God 
has put on the tablets of everlasting remem- 
brance. 

Faith does not mean just "standing fast;" 
it means doing things. To stand fast in one 
place is not enough. You must be "carrying 
on." The boy Casabianca stood, "stood fast" 
on the burning deck, and then there was a 
loud noise and "the boy, Oh, where was he?" 

Our Lord Jesus did not just stand fast. He 
moved. He went into peril. He faced angry 
men. He spoke the truth to men's faces in 
words that stung like a whiplash of fire. 

I wish from the heart of me that no artist 
had ever attempted to paint a picture of Jesus. 
Jesus was not like the gentle and velvety pic- 

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tures represent Him to have been. He was a 
majestic Man. He made sacrifices. He was 
ready to die for what He believed. He did 
die for what He believed. 

Sirs, you must not imagine that Jesus went 
tip-toeing through the world softly and gently 
lest He wake somebody up. He woke every- 
body up. He was the Lion of the Tribe of 
Judah. He was the strongest figure that ever 
walked through human history. His master- 
ful presence drove bargaining Jews out of 
the temple and with His strong hand He over- 
turned their money-tables and scattered their 
treasured coins on the marble floor. His up- 
lifted hand turned back the mob on the night 
of the betrayal and they fell before Him with 
their lips in the dust. Jesus is strong! He 
is the Man ! He is mighty ! He is the Mas- 
ter ! He is the center of our Faith. Looking 
at Him, imitating Him, we become possessed 
of the faith that removes mountains. 

Walk beside Jesus and He will not take 
you through the easy places, He will lead 
you through the hard places, through the dan- 
gerous places, through the places of pain and 
sadness, through the places of storm and bat- 
tle, — He went through all of them Himself. — 
but He will be beside you all the time, the 
Strong Son of God, to shield you and to lead 
you safe through into the Great Light! 

You cannot remove mountains by sitting in 
your parlor in a rocking chair and trying to 
think them out of existence. You cannot say 
a form of words over them like the presti- 
digitators do: ''Exi! Exi! hocus pocus! Abra- 
cadabra !" and expect them to go. Jesus never 
taught that the kind of faith that would re- 
move mountains was of the type that would 

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make you cozy and comfortable. He taught 
that His kind of faith would lead you into 
life's hard battles, but it would give you joy, 
the joy of conquest, the joy of final victory. 

We have a hymn that says : 
"Must I be carried to the skies 

On flowery beds of ease, 
While others fought to win the prize, 

And sailed through bloody seas?" 

There are those who sing that hymn as 
though they scorned all thought of ease, and 
then, immediately after, close the hymn book 
and go out and live the sort of life that proves 
that they want to get to heaven in the easiest 
way, without any toil or any blood or any sac- 
rifice. 

They will tell you that they feel safe; that 
they have so much faith in God that they are 
sure everything is going to come out all right ; 
and that the mountain of Kaiserism is going 
to be removed ; and that you mustn't worry 
about it ; and that everything is going to be 
just perfectly lovely. 

To feel safe in the hours through which we 
are now passing is not a display of faith in 
God ; it is a display of foolhardiness ; it is a 
display of credulity. We have been safe up 
to this moment from the direct attacks of the 
Huns not on account of our foolhardy faith, 
but on account of Great Britain's wall of steel 
battleships. And those who feel safe just 
now are dreaming a fool's dream; are living 
in an idiot's paradise. 

Doubtless some of these persons are pious; 
but the presence of piety in a heart does not 
prove that one has good common sense. I 
have known persons who seemed to me to be 



as righteous as Abraham, who did not possess 
the brains of a rabbit. 

The opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt 
is a passive thing. The opposite of faith is 
unbelief. Unbelief is an active thing. 

If you have lived through the past four 
years without any doubts, without walking 
out at night under the stars and having your 
mind torn and rent with doubt, without being 
stunned and dizzy now and then with doubt, 
— it is not a sign that you have strong faith, 
rt is a sign that you do not possess a reason- 
ing sense. But real faith, the faith that is able 
to remove mountains, seizes the doubts and 
fights them and overcomes them and looks 
past them to God, and then goes on battling 
and believing in spite of the doubts. 

Keep it in your minds, sirs, that faith is 
not a virtue of the pacifist, of the slacker. 
Faith does not make the pacifist and the 
slacker what they are. The lack of a spinal 
column makes them what they are. 

An enterprising butcher had an advertise- 
ment in your paper yesterday, "Backbones, 
17 cents." His store ought to have been 
crowded to the walls by the pacifists and the 
slackers. 

People with pink tea in their veins, people 
who are afraid to fight and then blame it on 
their religion, people with thin, watery blood, 
must not think of thesmselves as red-blood 
people. 

Real red blood is red, it is never pacifist; it 
is never neutral ; it is never watery and thin ; 
it is red ; it is vital ; it is alive. 

It is your good fortune, my people, and 
mine, to be citizens of the United States of 



America, a great Republic. A Republican form 
of Government is the highest form of Govern- 
ment ever devised by man, but it can really 
govern none but the highest form of people. 
A Republic has no machinery to strike back 
at the pacifist and slacker and the spy and the 
traitor. A Republic is slow ; it is patient ; it 
waits. Mr. Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, 
at the Governor's meeting in Washington on 
April 7th, said : ''The greatest criticism heard 
is against the timorous attitude of our Na- 
tional Government towards treason.'' Speak- 
ing of the slackers and the spies, he said : "We 
will put the fear of God into the hearts of 
those who live among us and fatten upon us, 
and are not Americans." 

Now I am sure that we will not go on for- 
ever permitting the Hun sympathizers to 
launch their Red Rhetoric at the United 
States, and then punish them by giving them 
a nice place to sleep and plenty to eat in the 
internment stockades at the expense of our 
loyal people. When agitators have defied 
American public opinion too far, American 
sentiment will kill them like the lightning and 
wreck them like the tempest. 

Our splendid American boys who have gone 
to the front and who are going to the front, — 
God has endowed them with the Faith that is 
vital, the Faith that throbs with life, the Faith 
that will cast the mountains into the sea. We 
are proud of them. We believe in them. We 
glory in them. 

But, too, we are proud of the men of Europe 
who are our associates in this war. We are 
proud of the Italians fighting on the frozen 
heights, fighting in the snow. We are proud 
of the British. 

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Some persons used to say sneeringly, "The 
British do not fight ; they get everybody else 
to do their fighting." But, looking at Sir 
Douglas Haig and his magnificent Britons 
standing with their backs to the wall, aided by 
Canadians and Australians and South Africans 
and New Zealanders ; — looking at the Scottish 
regiments from the hills, whom the Huns call 
the 'Xadies from Hell," on account of their 
kilts, — we feel that the British are bone of our 
bone and flesh of our flesh, and worthy of ev- 
ery tribute our lips can speak. 

And the French ! Mr. Harvey in his *'War 
Weekly" says: ''France scarcely speaks. She 
is too busy fighting!" 

"France, that divine marvel, mystery, mir- 
acle among the nations, — France, the voluble, 
the volatile, the mercurial, the capricious, — 
France gives no sign of her martyrized dis- 
tress." 

"Bleeding at every pore, burdened beyond 
all credence of endurance, she sets her face as 
a flint and her heart as adamant, and has no 
word of complaint, no word of repining, no 
word of reproach, — no word save the grim 
growl beneath her sobbing breath : "They 
shall not pass !" These are the men out of the 
nations that with the help of American boys 
will remove the mountain. 

We, as Americans, do not want to take from 
the Hun anything that of right belongs to the 
Hun. We do not want his house, nor his wife, 
nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor 
his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his. 
But we want decency. We want the right to 
live righteously and justly and soberly before 
God. 

We want to chase out of the world the most 
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debased being who ever polluted the atmos- 
phere of this planet by inhaling it. 

This is not a war. It is a tiger-hunt. We 
are striking at man-eating tigers. When we 
have destroyed Prussianism we shall have de- 
stroyed the most direful evil in all human 
time. Wasn't it Napoleon Bonaparte who 
used to say : "Prussia was hatched from a 
cannon ball?" 

America is in this war. She dared not stand 
neutral any longer. Maybe she stood neu- 
tral too long. Assuredly had not America 
put her hand to the sword, the very paving- 
stones in the streets would have cried out 
against her. 

Do you know how great is the crisis at this 
moment? Are you reading the books that 
tell you the truth about the war? Mr. Curtin's 
book, **The Land of Deepening Shadow," a 
terrible and pitiful book, shows you the real 
Germany, the Germany of fact and not of fic- 
tion, the Hun with his mask stripped off, 
showing him as he is; "The Crime," one of 
the most able books of the war, written by a 
German, against Germany. Only the first vol- 
ume of ''The Crime" has issued from the press. 
A second volume is to follow. 

"Private Peet — Two Years in Hell and Back 
With a Smile," — a book that will keep you up 
after your bedtime hour. 

"German Atrocities," by Newell Dwight 
Hillis, a book that will send your blood ham- 
mering through your veins like liquid fire. 

Read all of these books if you have the time, 
read some of them if you lose a few hours of 
sleep, and you will feel that the Republican- 
ism of America is needed just now in the 
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World and that our flag with its Stars and 
Stripes needs to mingle its colors with the 
other flags of World-freedom to remove the 
mountain of tyranny and brutality from the 
earth forever and forever. 

"There is something in our Flag 

And the little burnished Eagle 
That is more than emblematic; 

Something glorious and regal. 
If that flag goes down to ruin, 

Time will then, without a warning, 
Turn the dial back to midnight, 

And the world must wait till morning." 

Our church is one out of three hundred 
churches in Los Angeles which has been asked 
to hold a patriotic service either at the hour 
of morning or of evening worship. Three 
hundred ministers in Los Angeles are sup- 
posed to be standing up in their pulpits today 
and making a drive for Liberty Bonds. It has 
been found necessary to help to awaken the 
people through appeals from the platform. 

There are persons in our city who cannot 
subscribe for Liberty Bonds, — invalids who 
are unable to win their daily bread ; aged per- 
sons who are living on an annuity that is so 
narrow that they are next door to want; per- 
sons whose occupation is taken from them by 
the stoppage of work in their departments. 
But there are persons who fail to contribute 
from sheer indifference ; some who fail be- 
cause of the insane love of money; some who 
fail because they see in such a contribution a 
great sacrifice. 

Sacrifice? What do you call a sacrifice? 
What have they given, those fifty-eight be- 
loved boys, whose stars are on our Service 

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Flag? They have offered their lives as a sac- 
rifice. For us, for the saving of our nation, 
they will march undaunted into the roaring 
red flame of war! 

Sacrifice? What do you call a sacrifice? 
What have their dear ones given who have 
seen these boys march away in their beautiful 
young manhood — appointed to death in the 
Great Finger beckon? 

Do we who have given only money, who 
have even given largely of money, do we re- 
alize what is meant by sacrifice? 

If you were in England today, sir, you 
would not be asked to buy a Liberty Bond. 
Thirty per cent of your income would be 
taken out of your hand in war tax — thirty dol- 
lars out of every one hundred dollars of in- 
come; with an income of two thousand dol- 
lars your tax bill would be six hundred dol- 
lars. England would not ask you for it. Eng- 
land would take it and not say ''thank you." 
That may come to pass in the United States. 
Our Government has the right to compel us 
to give. 

They told me at Liberty Loan headquar- 
ters yeterday of a calculation made by Mr. 
Leslie Henry, one of the speakers. He fig- 
ured it out that if a man of substance is ac- 
customed to getting seven per cent on his in- 
vestments, he receives seventy dollars on the 
investment of one thousand dollars. In buy- 
ing four and one-quarter per cent Liberty 
Bonds, he loses $27.50 on each one thousand 
dollars he withdraws from a seven per cent 
investment. 

Now, consider the enlisted boy. The aver- 
age monthly earnings of the boy of war age 

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is $65.00. The boy enlists for thirty dollars 
per month. He gives to the Government thir- 
ty-five dollars per month, besides risking his 
life. That is four hundred and twenty dollars 
per year given to the Government by the boy. 
It would be necessary for the man of sub- 
stance to buy fourteen thousand dollars worth 
of Liberty Bonds before he has equaled the 
money gift of every enlisted boy, besides the 
fact, that, as Mr. Henry phrased it, "He saves 
his hide by staying at home." 

I wish you could understand that we are 
not giving when we buy Liberty Bonds; we 
are making a loan to our Government. We 
still have the money after we buy the Bond, 
and the Government pays us for the use of it. 
Here is a tin box with a slot in it. You put 
one hundred dollars through the slot, and 
leave it alone for one year. Touch a button 
at the end of the year and seventeen twenty- 
five cent pieces drop out into your hand — and 
you still have your original one hundred dol- 
lars while the United States Government has 
the use of it. 

I believe in this war as a Holy War be- 
cause we are battling for cleanness and de- 
cency and the sacred rights of mankind. The 
Lord of Hosts is with us. 

No one can tell us when this war will end. 
Former President Taft said a week ago: *T 
am in favor of amending the draft law so that 
we can raise an army of five millions of men 
or six millions of men in two years ;" and he 
added : "We won't win until this nation is a 
house of mourning. We will have to go down 
into the valley of the shadow of death, but 
the result will be worth the cost." 
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I have my own convictions that we are des- 
tined to win this war. I feel certain that our 
own soldier-boys will never cease their on- 
ward drive until their triumphal cheers ring 
and echo over the homes and castles and pal- 
aces and cathedrals of Berlin, and, led by the 
martial mus4c of the nations, they march be- 
hind the Stars and Stripes and the other Vic- 
tory banners through the avenues and streets 
of the captured city. 



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